Best Documentation

Best Documentation Finalist

Lightning Design System 2

Salesforce

Introduction

The Lightning Design System 2 (SLDS 2) provides a unified design framework across Salesforce’s product ecosystem, ensuring consistency, efficiency, and an improved user experience. It includes reusable components, pattern libraries, guidelines, and tools that support both designers and developers. Documentation, hosted on zeroheight, serves as the definitive source of truth and supports enablement, awareness, and continuous improvement. Beyond UI elements, SLDS 2 is a strategic asset evolving to support AI-driven experiences through metadata and taxonomy. Maintained by the multidisciplinary UX Foundations team, it drives alignment across products and empowers a wide community of internal and external users.

The Documentation

The Salesforce Lightning Design System 2 (SLDS 2) documentation is designed as a single source of truth, making it easy for teams to discover, adopt, and apply consistent design practices. Structured around clear pillars—Getting Started, Foundations, Patterns, Components, Tooling, and Inclusive Design—it provides tailored guidance for designers, developers, and product managers alike.

Key highlights include:

Component detail with dedicated tabs for Design, Develop, Specifications, and Accessibility.
Persona-specific best practices to support diverse user needs.
Unified Component Taxonomy that standardizes naming and behavior across design tools and codebases.
Interactive playgrounds that let users explore and customize components in real time.

Maintained by Salesforce’s cross-functional UX Foundations team, the documentation empowers users to work faster, stay consistent, and deliver accessible, scalable experiences.

The Impact

The SLDS 2 documentation has transformed how Salesforce customers and internal teams design and build reliable experiences. By serving as a single source of truth across 10+ product and engineering teams, it eliminates fragmentation, speeds up delivery, and ensures every product is consistent and accessible. Regular analytics and feedback loops drive continuous improvement, while persona-specific guidance makes it usable for everyone from designers to developers. Looking ahead, SLDS 2 is preparing for AI-enabled, real-time support, setting a new benchmark for design system documentation. It deserves recognition for its clarity, innovation, and measurable impact on one of the world’s largest design ecosystems.

Timeline

Nominations will be open from Tuesday 13 May. If you have any questions about the nomination process, then check out the FAQs, or if your question isn't answered, please get in touch at community@zeroheight.com

13 May, 2025
Once the nominations are closed, we'll be collating the longlist and working through it to determine a shortlist. The shortlist will be determined by the team at zeroheight, and will be based on uniform judging criteria (which we will share in a month or two). With the shortlist creation, we aim to remove as much bias as possible and give everyone a fair chance across the board.

22 August, 2025
In September, the shortlist will be announced, including public voting! We'll notify all folks as to whether they made the shortlist. The judges will then individually judge each shortlisted entry. We'll also have public voting on each category live on the site!

15 September, 2025
Once all the judges and public votes are counted, we'll then be able to determine the winner for each category, based off a weighted compilation of votes.

3 November, 2025
In December, we'll gather the community together at an event in London to announce the winners live. We'll also be live-streaming the ceremony for those who can't make it. The live event will be invite only, but we'll offer the community a chance to apply for a ticket later in the year! We'll also post the results to the zeroheight site the day after the event.

December 2025 (TBA)